Immersion Performance

Trying to explain Dead White Zombies is no easy task: the local avant-garde theater troupe isn’t just avant-garde, they’re wild. They aren’t just a “theater” troupe — they exist in site-specific installations. And, well, they aren’t strictly about acting, either. They perform, they create, they move, they make music, and they challenge everything you think you know about the arts.

—Dallas Observer

PHi

Piekarnia Art Center

Wroclaw, Poland

Work-in-progress

w/Robert Liskek

July 2023

Holy Bone

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

DWZ succeeded in truly marrying spirituality and performance for a Western audience.

—Art and Culture Texas

Performance documentation / 1:02:24

Though there are scenic elements, they occur in concert with their environments, like art installations that take advantage of the buildings, the neighborhood, and even the time of day. There are locations that traffic in olfactory overloads, like incense. Sprinkled along the way are interactive moments from the tactile to taste. Be ready for anything.

—David Novinski, Theatre Jones

A video love note to the audiences of Holy Bone / 3:40

Holy Bone, Far Side of Consciousness Assembly Meetings, the random performance of the Holy Bones in public spaces as a form of research and development.

Map of the Holy Bone performance.
Each symbol represents an event in the Holy Bone initiation.

A series of unannounced public performance provocations was a prelude to the Holy Bone performance. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if anyone notices the Holy Bone performers—or “Boners,” as Riccio refers to them. These performers share something with the shamanistic figures that inspired them insofar as they are not so much meant to be characters as symbolic actors, and their actions point our awareness beyond our experience of the physical world toward the suggestion of some metaphysical other. Holy Bone is a warning or maybe a prophecy.

—D Magazine

DP92

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

Dead White Zombies is one of the most interesting theater companies in North Texas, offering immersive experiences and so-out-there-it’s-cool scripts by Thomas Riccio. Will you be talking about it for days afterwards? Definitely.

—DFW.Com

This is voluptuous, loopy, scintillating theatre that challenges the soul and rattles our teeth. It's black humor laced with the lyric authority of dream logic. It's metaphysical redemption masquerading as grotesque psychological quackery. It's audacious, original, and implacable.

—Dallas Examiner

DP92

In DP92, Riccio attempts to unite the origins of life — the mollusk — with the controlled chaos of modern humanity. But really, what he's reminding us is that we're all in this life together. We all come from the same place and return to it, as life folds in on itself over and over again.

—Dallas Observer

Performance documentation / 59:27

kaRaoKe MoTeL

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

At a Dead White Zombies show, rules do not apply. Known for its site-specific performance installations, staged everywhere from warehouses to a former stash house. The original scripts are fluid and transcend any one playing space

—Arts and Culture Texas

Regardless of what it means to you, Dead White Zombies' latest immersive show, KaRaoKe MoTeL, strangely offers a sense of well-being.

—Theatre Jones

Video excerpt / 3:59

There are no rules in this seedy motel except when you can check in and when you can check out. Your adventure awaits as you leave behind the mind-numbing fluorescent lights of the cubicles. You may begin curiously jiggling doorknobs. Behind one, you may find a man in drag with his hand up a ventriloquist dummy. How you react to what you find is the theater.

—Dallas Observer

Advert by Dax Norman / 0:49

Bull Game

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

Bull Game puts on display the last, dying gasp of Western Civilization.

—Theatre Jones

In Bull Game, Dead White Zombies’ latest immersive performance, the stakes are high, but the delivery is grounded. This show lampoons professional sports, male posturing, and our predictable crowd reactions, all while giving a sly wink.

—D Magazine

T.N.B.

(typical nigga behavior)

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

The most electrifying and brutal theater performances of my theater-going life. The performance I lived was staged in an abandoned crack house in Dallas. And it defies all the words. I have spent the last three days desperately searching for ways to describe it.

—K102 FM Radio

No other company is experimenting with the kind of intellectually stirring and socially urgent content that Dead White Zombies so brazenly tackles. Because of its experimentation, radicalism, and fearlessness. It is arguably the most significant artistic contribution to the Dallas community.

—Pegasus News, Dallas

T.N.B. (Typical Nigga Behavior)

Dead White Zombies might amaze or enrage you with its immersive production of T.N.B. Either way, chalk one up for a theater that's shaking things up. It's epic, cinematic, and gut-wrenching.

—Theatre Jones

Performance documentation / 1:21:22

(w)hole

Dead White Zombies

Writer/Director/Installations

Taken apart, as in autopsy, it strains and fragments, laments, and groans, and lashes out with sexual angst and sweaty frustration. Scenes ebb and flow as the audience floats, adrift, overwhelmed by images and sound. Sensate, intemperate immersion. “w(hole)” weaves together with satisfying symphonic grace. Emerge refreshed, cleansed, jubilant.

—Dallas Examiner

Scenes spark around us like a long tail of igniting firecrackers. Another room is illuminated. Next, a vignette. The twisting paths feel like the unfathomable tunneling of memory storage, but the lives we're moving through are not our own. Even the sound, anchored scene by scene, bleeds gently into the next. We're fumbling into another's databank, threading together the experiences as we travel.

—Dallas Observer